By Christopher Zoukis Killing God’s Enemies relates the origin, history and activities of the church of Christian Identity and its violent outgrowth called the Phineas Priesthood. In doing so, the book reveals the group’s philosophy of hate; their methodology, which is death to all blacks, Jews, homosexuals and abortionists; and their goal, which is an […]

By Christopher Zoukis Racism, white power and white supremacy have been around since the beginning of mankind. They are as old as dirt. Religious fundamentalists trace the superiority of the white race back to the Bible. They cite many and various passages from the Old Testament as proof of their assertion, including Adam and Eve, […]

Robert Mathews began raising cattle, got married to a woman named Debbie McGarrity, a woman of Scottish descent. When she proved infertile, they adopted a son. Mathews, though, really wanted a child from his own loins. So he started seeing a woman named Zillah Craig. She, too, was of Scottish descent, as Mathews didn’t want to taint his bloodline. They had a daughter and his marriage to Debbie went to hell.

He got a job as an electrician at the Bunker Hill Mine Company, which tore raw zinc out of the ground. The mine closed due to poor management and the sagging price of zinc. So Robert got a job at the Portland Lehigh Cement Company. Yet he remained dissatisfied with his life. Something was missing. It was as if he had mislaid his soul. Richard Butler

So he started looking for it in all the wrong places – extreme right wing politics and warped interpretations of history.

Like Solomon in the Bible, Mathews decided that knowledge might make him happy. So he read a lot of politics and history. Most of what he read supported a racist interpretation of history. From this junk, Mathews concluded that he wasn’t the problem. He wasn’t a loser after all. The real problem was that the white race was being polluted and challenged in its supremacy by other races.

So Mathews started another club, a club for white people only. He invited other white supremacist families to Washington State. He called it the “White American Bastion.” And to learn more about starting his own country within a country, he visited the Aryan Nations, a group started by a guy named Richard Butler. The Aryan Nations were white power exclusionists. They were white. They wanted power. And everybody who wasn’t white and didn’t want power was excluded from their club.

Aryan Nations dreamed of a whites-only kingdom, which would be located in Idaho. And of course, Richard Butler would get to be king. They advertised themselves as Christian Nazis.

Those emasculated young, white, ultra-conservative young men, hating that which they could not understand, they did the only thing they could. The thing that gave them a sense of control, a sense of dominion.

They fought back. Image courtesy amazon.com

Mathews started his own cultic group. It would be a group like those he saw around him – the people in charge – people like bankers and lawyers and businessmen. They had money. They had power. They had respect. Mathews would have those, too.

The Sons of Liberty. That’s what he called his group. The name was an obvious rip-off from the American Revolution. In effect, then, Mathews had seceded from the society that had taken his manhood from him.

The Sons of Liberty were an anti-communist, extremist militia group. Made up of mostly Mormons and survivalists, they numbered about 30 men. They didn’t really know what to do to regain their manhood. They just knew they were angry. So they decided to revolt against paying taxes, because they felt that would be a good place to start. At least it would make a statement: “they were mad as hell and they weren’t going to take it anymore” – to quote the rabid newscaster in the movie Network.

Mathews set the example. He claimed 10 dependents on his W-4 form. This wretched attempt was his idea of tax resistance. It was more than wretched, it was pathetic. The IRS arrested him for tax fraud. He was tried in a court of law, where, when it was all over, he was found guilty. Even his sentence highlighted his status as a loser: six months probation. He couldn’t even get thrown into prison. At least then he could have felt like a martyr and laid claim to a bad-boy image.

Taking a cue from the zealous Levitical priest Phineas, who, with a thrust of his holy spear, dispatched Zimri and his girlfriend, one group of supremacists calls itself the Phineas Priesthood.

The Phineas Priesthood is a Christian Identity group in the United States. They oppose interracial intercourse, mixing of races, homosexuality and abortion. They also hate Jews, any kind of cultural pollution and paying taxes. And in general, they don’t like women much either. In fact, the Phineas Priesthood is so opposed to everything that they have no governing body, no meetings, and no membership process. You become a Phineas Priest by simply adopting the beliefs of the Priesthood and acting upon them.

Blowing up federal buildings, bombing abortion clinics, robbing banks and murdering immoral people who participate in interracial relationships are approved methods of acting upon your beliefs, according to the Phineas Priesthood and Christian Identity.

Robert Jay Mathews was a Phineas Priest, only he didn’t refer to himself by that term, because the term wasn’t invented until 1990, which was when Richard Kelly Hoskins coined it. More about Richard Hoskins later. Yet the idea of a “solitary warrior” did exist. And that’s the way Mathews thought of himself – as a “solitary warrior” for God. Robert Jay Mathews / Image courtesy en.wikipedia.org

Mathews decided he could “accomplish more for God” – those were his words – if he was a little more organized. If his organization combined violence with a system, the sky was the limit.

If still alive, Robert Mathews would be almost 60 years old now. Instead, he was dead at the age of 31.

The ballad began in Marfa, Texas. Where, on January 15, 1953, Una Mathews delivered the last of her three boys. She and her husband Johnny named the baby boy Robert Jay Mathews.

As you can tell by the spelling of the name ‘Mathews,’ they were of Scottish descent. And the Scots are noted for being stubborn and violent and honorable.

Robert came from good stock, which meant his family had some money, owned property and were educated. His father was the mayor of Marfa, the President of the Chamber of Commerce, a businessman and a deacon in the town’s Methodist Church. While Una Matthews was a god-fearing woman; a good mother, respectable wife and a den mother for the Boy Scouts.

By Christopher Zoukis The color of a person’s skin is of no consequence whatsoever. This is a prime verity. So why – throughout history -have so many people made an issue of it? Well, let’s see: To me, it is fascinating that there is no universal definition of what is meant by whiteness, being white, […]

It was Solomon, the favorite son of King David and heir to the throne of Israel, who wrote, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” And the idea that the white race is superior to the so-called colored races is no exception. It’s been around a long, long time. To demonstrate this fact, it is necessary to take a quick look at the idea of ‘race’ and the general history of ‘racism.’ King Solomon / Image courtesy en.wikipedia.org

Race, which is defined as “any of the major biological divisions of mankind, distinguished by color and texture of hair, color of skin and eyes, stature, bodily proportions, etc.: many ethnologists now consider that there are only three primary divisions, the Caucasian (loosely, white race), Negroid (loosely, black race), and Mongoloid (loosely, yellow race), each with various subdivisions: the term has acquired so many unscientific connotations that in this sense it is often replaced in scientific usage by ethnic stock or group.”

White was first used in the racial sense, as an adjective, in the year 1604. Whoever it was that used it, did it like this: “of those races (chiefly European or of European Extraction) characterized by light complexion.” Certainly it was used prior to that, but this is the first recorded usage. And it is assumed that this usage was quite common at that time, which shows how long ‘racism’ has been around.

William Perry, in 1676, distinguished between blacks and whites, calling blacks a totally different and separate species. Blacks differed from Europeans not only in skin color “but also in natural manners and in the internal qualities of their minds.” No one challenged Perry’s conclusions. In fact, Europeans agreed. There was nothing startling about these remarks. It was common knowledge. In other words, bigotry and hatred were prevalent.

By the 1950s, Swift was delivering his ideology by means of daily radio broadcasts. A dynamic and charismatic speaker, Swift’s message appealed to more and more people, slowly spreading across the country, appealing primarily to malcontents, those disaffected by their lot in the social and financial pecking-order of life. These converts felt success and happiness were being taken from them by a vast conspiracy, which was composed of the government and its life-sucking taxes; the Jews, who were perceived as controlling the government; and the ‘mud people,’ who stole the jobs rightfully belonging to white people. Righteous anger at what was happening was the common denominator among Swift’s adherents. Richard Butler / Photo courtesy www.topsecretwriters.com

Somewhere in there, Swift hooked up with Colonel William Potter Gale, who organized anti-tax and paramilitary groups in the United States, including the California Rangers and the Posse Comitatus. Colonel Gale introduced Swift to Richard Girnt Butler, who later founded the Aryan Nations. Butler was an ardent white supremacist, who had never really considered the advantages of combining his racist philosophy with religion. But he was willing to listen. Once he heard the verbal pyrotechnics of Swift’s message, Butler saw the light. Race and religion were the way to go. For religion added a spiritual urgency to the hate of racism. The result was an unprompted and spontaneous fanaticism – the army of God’s chosen people.

With Swift at the helm, aided by Butler and Colonel Gale, Christian Identity continued to grow, slowly but surely. Then things started to fall apart for two reasons. First, Wesley Swift died in 1970. It quickly became apparent that Christian Identity was as much a cult of personality as it was a religion. The movement was only as strong as its honcho. Butler assumed control, but didn’t have the force of personality or flair of Swift. Membership began to sag as members looked for someone to prop them up.

The next person to ride the British-Israelite wave was John Wilson. In 1840, Wilson published his book Lectures on Our Israelitish Origin, which was well-received and went through four subsequent printings.

John Taylor caught the wave in 1859, when he published The Great Pyramid,Why Was It Built and Who Built It? Taylor maintained that the Israelites had built the Pyramid of Cheops. His argument rested upon the fact that British feet and inches formed the basis of the pyramid’s construction.

By 1871, the waves of British-Israelism were getting larger and coming more frequently. For that was the year Edward Hine, who was a banker made a big splash with the publication of his book The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, which became a bestseller, selling 250,000 copies. Later, in 1884, Hine boarded a ship bound for America, where he intended to spread the gospel of British-Israelism. And he did. While traveling around, Hine advanced the notion of Americans being the lost tribe of Manasseh. A few years later, a man named Howard Rand, who hailed from Massachusetts, borrowed Hine’s gospel as his own. Only Rand made one significant change. He supplemented Hine’s gospel with the centuries-old disease called anti-semitism. For Rand believed the Jews were responsible for the ills of the world. Rand called his gospel “Christian Identity.”

The wave of British-Israelism crested in 1946. That was the year that Wesley Swift started his own church in Lancaster, California. Baptizing his church with the peculiar name of the Church of Jesus Christ-Christian, he rapidly established sister-churches in San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside, Hollywood and San Diego. Image courtesy covenantpeoplesministry.org

Swift, the only child of a prominent Methodist preacher, was born in New Jersey in 1913. God called him to preach while he was a teenager. By the time he was 18 years old, Wesley was a licensed preacher in the Methodist Church.

The lunch hour was almost over. It was hot and humid. People walked back to their places of work, eager to get out of the heat and into air-conditioned buildings. Eighty-eight year old James Wenneker von Brunn steered his car into a parking place near the 14th Street entrance of The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. It was June 10, 2009. James von Brunn / Image courtesy sezginalay.myblog.it

Von Brunn double-parked his car. It didn’t matter, because he knew he wouldn’t be coming back. The car would be towed. Then it would sit in some impound yard, waiting to be claimed. It would never be claimed.

The old man got out of the car and walked toward the building. He carried something long and slender in his right hand.

Seeing the elderly gentleman approaching the entrance, Stephen Tyron Johns politely opened the door and held it. Johns was a museum security guard. His job was to protect the premises and all those in it. Johns liked his job and he liked people, so he instinctively held the door open.